Saturday, January 27, 2018

Back in the 1980’s when
people—driven by the belief that “you can never be too rich or too
thin”—relentlessly jazzercised to Richard Simmons video cassettes, trans fats were
touted as a “heart healthy” way to lose weight.

Encouraged by public interest
groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which called trans
fats “a great
boon to American’s arteries,” food processors
replaced saturated fats with trans fats in thousands of products.

Unfortunately, researchers soon
discovered that trans fats were also causing 30,000
fatal heart attacks in the U.S. each year. The
promised benefits of trans fats, it seems, were more hype than reality. And the
same appears to be true for electric vehicles.

Once touted as the
environmentally friendly substitute for internal combustion engine vehicles
(ICE), new research suggests that EVs are much more expensive and significantly
more toxic than their ICE counterparts.

A big part of EVs’ toxicity to both
people and the planet is the process of producing the cars’ batteries. The Washington Post recently published a
scathing investigative series about the dangers associated with lithium-ion
battery production including: water
shortages in Argentina caused by lithium
mining, air
and water pollution in China caused by graphite
mining, and the children who are injured
and killed while mining for cobalt in the
Congo.

And because of the added emissions
incurred in producing car battery cells and packs, “the emissions caused by
manufacturing an electric vehicle far exceeds the emissions caused by manufacturing
a conventional vehicle of similar size,” according
to a
new report from the American Consumer Institute
(ACI).

The ACI report also cited recent
research by Arthur D. Little which found that EVs are much more expensive
to purchase and operate. Specifically, they found that “a compact electric
vehicle costs 44% more and a mid-size electric vehicle costs 60% more than
their gas-fueled counterparts” over a 20-year period of ownership.

The good news—if you’re wealthy enough to afford an EV—is
that they are heavily subsidized by the government. According to ACI, car buyers can qualify for up to $7,500 in federal tax
credits for buying an EV and state tax credits of up to $5,000. But because EVs
are so expensive to begin with these tax incentives are being lavished on the
wealthy, with as much as 60% of EV subsidies going to households earning over
$200,000 per year, while only 10% of electric vehicles subsidies went to households
earning less than $75,000 per year.

“These explicit and implicit
subsidies,” ACI wrote, “represent welfare for the rich at the cost of all
taxpayers.”

In their report, ACI warns policymakers
that “incentives designed to encourage electric vehicle ownership can have
adverse consequences on society that outweigh their benefits.” Let’s hope they
get the message before our nation’s highway arteries are clogged with these
heavily polluting vehicles.